Jane Alexiadis: An Ashcan School painting

By Jane Alexiadis

Correspondent

Posted:
05/23/2013 10:00:00 AM PDT

Updated:
05/23/2013 04:03:44 PM PDT

Q Long before I was born, my parents acquired this painting and it hung over our living room fireplace. It was done by Howard Baer, measures 28 by 20 inches and has his signature on the lower right. Howard Baer's brother, Townsend Baer, was in my parents' circle of close friends. I met Howard Baer several times when I was a child, but don't remember much other than his face. Townsend Baer and his wife were known as Uncle Townie and Aunt Roweena to me and my siblings, and we knew their children very well. I am guessing the painting was done during wartime, while Howard Baer was in Italy. I'd like a rough idea of what it would bring, were I to sell it.

A Howard Baer was born in Pittsburgh in 1907. He studied at the Carnegie Institute before moving to New York City in 1929, just in time to witness the stock market collapse. He was a part of the second generation of artists affiliated with the Ashcan School.

Although never a truly organized group, Ashcan School artists began appearing in New York City around 1905. Their emergence paralleled the Arts and Crafts movement in America; the two groups shared some of the same ideals.

Arts-and-crafts furniture was meant as an antidote to the fussiness of machine-made Victorian furnishings. Similarly, Ashcan artists challenged what they perceived as the overtly elitist styles favored by the Impressionists, finding beauty in everyday activities, just as the arts-and-crafts furniture-makers saw the structural elements of the piece and the natural characteristics of the material used as "honest" ornamentation, the only kind needed.

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Considered almost avant-garde at the time, Ashcan artists depicted scenes of tenements, clotheslines, dance halls, boxers and pushcart peddlers. Their work reflected labor disputes, immigrant life and the poor, while celebrating the dignity of the working class. Though never a unified artistic or political movement, many of the Ashcan artists had socialist and Marxist sympathies.

In 1908, one Ashcan artist was rejected from a show at New York's National Academy of Design. In protest, several others mounted their own exhibit at New York's Macbeth Gallery. Hostile critics ridiculed the exhibition and derisively labeled the artists as "apostles of ugliness" and "the Ash Can School." Though designed as an insult, the term was embraced by the artists and their fans, and it stuck.

Although best known as a newspaper and magazine illustrator (whose clients included The New Yorker and Esquire), Howard Baer spent several months during the 1940s living in Mexico and polishing his painting techniques. At the start of World War II, he worked as a civilian correspondent for Naval Aviation News and spent time in Asia, chronicling events in Burma, China and India.

Baer was a prolific, talented, versatile artist who worked in pencil and ink, oils, watercolors and gouache. The majority of his works on the market today are lithographic images of some of his popular magazine drawings. Baer's paintings of subjects in Mexico, New York, Europe and Asia sometimes come on the market, but most collectors seem to focus on his illustrations of everyday American life.

Your charming study of a tenement alley with hanging laundry could have been painted in either New York or Italy. I love the muted colors and how the abstract quality of the piece gives it the feel of modern or contemporary art. I believe that such a charming, evocative scene of mid-20th-century urban working-class life would have a presale auction estimate of $800 to $1,200.

Jane Alexiadis is an appraiser with Michaan's Auctions. Send questions, a brief description and measurements to whatsitworth@michaans.com.